Page 93 of Coyote

Both those lines were his. Somewhere east of me, past anything I could see from here, he'd stopped and turned around and come back. How close he came to that light before he turned was anybody's guess. I saw it anyway. All that height standing dead still in the dark at the edge of the yellow, looking at those rows of chairs and a fat little radio and rows of men waiting to be entertained, and then turning around and walking away from it. The radio was still going. Nobody in that yard had so much as looked up.

He was out there somewhere, waiting for me to get to him.

Or waiting for Zaroff to find him first.

For nine years, I had nothing anybody could take from me. I found out I did the second I held that bandage. I had never, in my entire miserable life, been as dangerous as I was standing there.

Zaroff had a spot saved on that necklace for my fangs.

Fine.

I'd drag him down into the dirt of his own yard and rip his throat out with my teeth. I'd take those trophies off his neck, tear his teeth right out of his skull, and carry them back through the dark in my good hand to drop them right into John's palms before I'd let him touch my man.

I closed my fist around the gauze.

John and me were going to have words about this. But those words would happen after I kissed him, and after Zaroff was rotting in the desert alone and toothless.

I glanced back the way I'd meant to go. I could still do it. Still circle around, try to kill Zaroff on my own. But I might fail. I might get caught again, or I might be back there while Zaroff was out here finding and killing Big John and whoever else had come to help him.

I could stick to the plan and maybe have my revenge, or I could listen to the message Big John had tied to that branch: I'm here, little one. Come find me. Let's do this together.

At least, that was what I hoped he meant.

I turned my back on the compound and the pit, and I started west into the dark, walking the line Big John had walked out on.

I didn’t get far before the radio quit.

It stopped in the middle of a verse, and I stopped with it, one foot still off the ground. An hour. That was what the silence was. Zaroff had counted it out loud for his paying friends the way he said he would, and now he was done counting.

Then the light came.

It swung wide off the flatbed and crawled out across the flat, and I was standing in the middle of it in the brightest stretch of ground for a mile.

Somebody shouted. The shot came half a second behind it and went past my head close enough to hear, and it wasn’t a warning.

Then the horses came off the gravel, spreading wide because they didn’t know yet which way I’d break.

I ran.

Not away. Anybody can run away. I ran the line, straight down the middle of his light, toward the man who’d left it for me.

The glue on the medical tape tasted of bitter tin. I bit another strip off the roll, the fibers catching in my teeth, and smoothed it down onto the cold steel of the rifle stock. The tacky side faced up, a finger-width from the three strips before it. I needed to find the strips in the dark without looking down.

"You've been tearing at that tape for twenty minutes."

Ransom lay flat on the ledge above my left shoulder. I didn't look up. I couldn't risk the dirt sliding under my boots.

"He'll be bleeding," I whispered. My throat clicked when I swallowed.

"You don't know that."

"I know what condition Zaroff sends them back in."

Ransom didn't answer. Nobody up here had argued with me since we dragged ourselves out of the barn.

The heavy barrel of the rifle pressed into my thighs, pinning my legs to the dirt. I'd lost feeling in my legs. If I shifted to get the blood moving, the gravel would rattle, and the only sound I wanted in this gap was the one I'd been straining to hear since the sun went down.

The cold from the stone had crept through my jeans and set into my hip joints. Every time I tried to take a full breath, my ribs flared with a sharp, binding stitch. I kept my breathing shallow, my chest barely moving. Under my shirt, the bite over my heart throbbed with a hot, steady itch. I pressed two bare fingers against it, feeling the hard, swollen knot of the wound underneath. It didn't stop the itching, but the pressure kept me from scratching it raw.